[Consim-l] FW: Bloody Kasserine: A review by John Best (Part 2 of 2)

[Hjalmar Gerber]

Rules Completeness, Rules Length, Complexity, Organization:  The rulebook
for Bloody Kasserine is 15 pages long, including a description of the unit
types shown in the game, the examples of typical counters, and an
informative five page synopsis entitled "The Battle of Kasserine Pass".  The
actual rules make up only seven pages, so the length of the rulebook per se
will not try your patience here.  The rules are organized in paragraph form
around the major headings that you would expect (e.g, "Movement", "Combat",
"Combat Results").  The sequence of the rules seemed pretty logical, or at
least standard, to me.  The rules are supported with one diagram and example
showing how German tactical expertise works, but in general, there are no
examples of play provided.  The relatively numerous sections each with a
title "Player Note" offer some hints for play and these are offset in a gray
box.  There are indications in the rules, both in their written tone, and
relative brevity, that the GDW intended Bloody Kasserine as an "introductory
game", and by that expression, I mean a game that could be played by two
people who were previously unfamiliar with wargames.  I guess there were
still some such people in 1992.  Be that as it may, I think this game could
deliver on that promise in some important ways:  The game does not have a
large footprint, or a large number of counters.  And it's certainly the case
that two experienced gamers will be off and running with this game in a
matter of a few minutes time after opening the box.  As this implies, at a
conceptual level, the rules are not particularly complex.  However, there
are certain situations that occur seemingly often in the game that certainly
demand some thought, and in that sense, the rules might be somewhat less
than complete.  For me, most of these situations had to do with combat, and
"Engaged" results on the CRT.  On the errata sheet there is a set of six
"Commonly Asked Question" (My understanding is that these questions were
originally posed by the inestimable John Kula-many thanks!).  The answers to
these questions go a long way to clarifying what happens when non-engaged
units find themselves adjacent to Engaged units in their own phase, but
there were still some wrinkles that I found myself dealing with.  If you
play this game, you'll be studying this list of questions and answers.  A
lot.

Game Play and "Feel": I won't be able to give a play-by-play of the whole
game, but I will try to summarize the arc of the game's "story" and I'll
detail some of the specific episodes or encounters that stood out for me as
interesting, exciting or otherwise entertaining in an effort to tell you
what it "felt like" to play the game.  Before I do that, there are some
disclaimers that I must address regarding the way I play these games, as
these may affect the amount of credence you wish to accord my report.
First, except for the playtesting that I do, I always play wargames
solitaire.  Second, I always observe The Gamer's rounding and Fog of War
rules in all my wargaming.  Third, to enhance the Fog of War effect, I
covered each counter and stack in Bloody Kasserine with appropriate counters
from another wargame, and I did not permit myself to look under the covering
counter for the nonphasing side.  For this purpose, I used the Allied and
Axis "front line markers" from the venerable Ben Knight designed
double-blind game, The Normandy Campaign.  That is, the Axis units and
stacks were covered with an "iron cross" counter from The Normandy Campaign,
while the Allies were covered with a "white star" counter.  Fourth, I read a
rule two or three times:  If I still don't understand it, or if I'm bored by
the second or third reading, then I make up something that seems plausible
historically, simple, and workable in the context of the game.  For example,
that happened with regard to air power optional rules.  Just for the record,
I'm not advocating this sort of thing, although part of the fun of playing
wargames for me is seeing if I can make rules up that are just as clever as
the designer's.  In this play of Bloody Kasserine, I did use the breakdown
counters, and I did use the air units from the optional rules.  Keeping in
the spirit of the older design upon which this game is based, I did not use
the optional supply rules.  Here's how it went.
	On the initial turns, von Arnim and Rommel both did their thing,
rocking the Americans out of Sidi Bou Zid and Gafsa.  However, the Americans
were able to get some licks in:  On Turn 2 (each turn represents a day, the
game begins with Turn 1 on Feb. 14, 1943), still near Sidi Bou Zid, 3
battalions from the American 1st Armored attacked two companies from the 7th
Panzer regiment, rolling a "3" and making the Germans retreat through ZOCs,
thus destroying them.  But such outcomes were unusual in the early turns,
and by Turn 4, my notes show that I was already wondering how the Allies
could win the game-"they've already lost tons" of units.  By Turn 7 though,
I was also noticing another pattern.  For example, in one wild and crazy
outflanking maneuver made by DAK against hex 2418, the Allies had a French
cavalry unit, and a British armor unit defending on high ground (improbable,
yes I know, but the game does not prohibit that sort of thing).  The Allies
called in the gunfire available to them.  The attack went off at low odds,
and the Germans rolled an "11"-AE, eliminating a battalion of
panzergrenadiers, and a company of panzers in support.  The combat strength
of the artillery is in general way higher than the combat strength of the
other ground units especially when you play with the German breakdown
counters.  The resulting firepower can thus boost an attack up, but it can
also bring the odds down.  My notes indicate that for each formation in the
game (which tends to have its own artillery counter representing all the
guns available, presumably), "it's like each group has a battleship in tow".
By Turn 8, I had noted that the Germans' strength was gradually being
whittled down (still nothing like the Allied losses), but the Germans were
now able to make relatively few powerful stacks.  Finally, by the bottom of
Turn 8, there was actually a rupture of sorts in the Axis line-they really
had only a few low strength units between Feriana and Kasserine.  It was
basically the Allied artillery that was creating this effect.  The Allied
artillery was making it hard for the Axis to attack at more than 2:1 odds,
and there is a 1/36 chance of an AE at 2:1 odds.  The relative sparseness of
any game support features directly on the map was getting to me too.  On
this turn I noted, "No turn record?  That's annoying for a game made in
1992!"  On Turn 9, the Germans had been on the verge of achieving a
breakthrough in the high ground of hex 0913 and hex 0914, as they attempted
to drive on Thala (the "hard way" over the mountains instead of through
Kasserine Pass.  But this drive was defeated when they were forced to
counterattack because they had unengaged defenders in the ZOCs of engaged
attackers.  Both times the attack went off at 1:1, and both times the
Germans rolled a "12" (AE!).  That misfortune pretty much ended the Axis'
chances of victory.  The Allies retook Feriana, and this became the only
victory point hex that was still being contested.  On the last turn (Turn
11), the Axis attacked Feriana with 19 strength points (against 16
defending, 1:1).  The Axis rolled a "9", with the result, AR2.  The Allies
simply sat in place on their half of the last turn.  The Axis held 5 victory
points (2 for Kairouan, and one each for Kasserine, Sbiba, and Faid), which
is an Allied victory, one point short of a German Tactical victory.  So
after Turn 4, it looked to me like the Allies couldn't win, but by Turn 10,
it was the Axis that actually had only some meager chances.  The game's
victory conditions focus only on geography, but it might be interesting to
look at the losses in unit terms:
Nationality                   Units (dead pile)        Strength lost
Axis                              22                               66/68
(att/def)
Allies                            27                               91
So the Axis did indeed dish out a lot of punishment to the Allies, but the
point is always made that the Allies could recover their strength
(eventually, not in the time frame shown in the game) in guns and vehicles,
but the Germans could not.
	I'd like to offer some of my impressions about game play, not
necessarily in any particular sequence.  First, as already noted, artillery
seems like the real difference-maker in the game.  The Allies end up with
nine artillery counters, whose strength totals 58 factors, against the Axis
who have only three artillery counters, having a strength total of 22.  The
artillery can add their strength both offensively and defensively, so the
strength differential means that the Allies have 36 "additional" defense
factors that they can use to offset the relatively higher combat values of
the Germans.  It's true that these factors are limited by the range of the
artillery counter, but this raises another question.  With a scale of 5
miles per hex, what do you think would be an appropriate range for the
artillery counters?  How about 4 hexes?  They don't all have that range, but
some of them do, and I don't think any of them have less than a 3 hex range.
First of all, I think there is a little problem with unit scale here.
Obviously, the guns did not really have this kind of range (you can see the
source of my battleship comment though), but the long range is, I think, a
little bit of a design kludge for having all the guns of a division shown in
a single counter (which is definitely the case for the Axis).  In terms of
game play, the attacker has to declare his artillery support first, so the
defenders know where the attacks are coming.  For the Axis, this means they
are probably going to have only one artillery unit in barrage support, but
the Allies are going to be able to call in a whole "web" of gunfire on the
threatened hex.  As the Allies were reinforced with more and more artillery,
the Axis attacks had less and less success.  I should add in fairness that
the rulebook does have some text about using some of the optional
counterbattery fire, and the airpower rules to counteract some of these
effects.  I can't comment on that:  I did not use the counterbattery rules,
and the air rules were too hard for me to figure out as they were written so
I used my own simpler procedure.
	Reading about the events suggests that the various actions and
battles were often independent and isolated from each other, but the game
felt much more linear across the entire battlefield than those accounts
suggest.  This doesn't mean that it was a bad game per se, but it seemed
like the various formations could reinforce each other much more quickly,
easily, and over greater distances than was the case historically.  At least
the way the game played for me, there were a lot of attacks at low odds, and
the outcomes of such attacks were often unpredictable.  Do you like games
where each side's momentum seems to swing back and forth with each turn?  I
think there are lot of players who like this sort of "Yay, I'm winning-uh
oh, now I'm losing, but wait, now I'm winning again!" kind of game.  I like
baseball games to be that way, but not necessarily wargames.  This seems
like a very "luck" oriented game to me.
	On a more positive note, I did appreciate the attempt to blur the
"edges" of the player turn as the abstraction that we recognize they are.
What I mean is that sometimes when you are the nonphasing player, there are
things that happen on the CRT (mostly the Contact and Engaged results) that
don't necessarily seem bad exactly at the time.  But these things sometimes
do commit to some sort of action in your half of the game turn, especially
if you were counting on certain units to be unengaged and available for
maneuver.

Overall:  I appreciated the simple design steps that were used to show
German tactical expertise.  A few easy rules created a powerful Axis force,
realistically, and without a lot of mind-numbing, excitement-deadening
overhead.  I appreciated the attempt to tell the basic story of the events
between February 14, and February 20, 1943.  It was a story that would be
repeated over and over again for the next two years:  The Axis still had the
power and expertise to surprise, but not to sustain an attack against their
enemies.  And the inevitable attritional factors of war meant that such
surprise attacks were ultimately more costly than strategic.  Against that,
I found that I didn't care for the "whole-hex" combat results, and the
"bang, you're dead" one-step units.  I also did not like the game's
volatility.  These were simply personal factors for me.  In a technical
sense, this game played ok, but it was dry meat that did not sustain my
interest at all.  I had a lot of fun playing the precursor game on which
this game was based, the old John Hill design, Kasserine Pass, and this game
does not seem to be that different on the face of it.  Perhaps my
expectations of the 1970s game were low, or my expectations here a little
too high.  Suffice it to say that I believe the next time my copy of Bloody
Kasserine is opened, it will be by my heirs who may enjoy a chuckle or two
in remembrance of me and my arcane hobby as they puzzle over the contents of
the box and my handwritten notes.